Learn
Silkscreen vs. giclée: two fine art print methods, two different jobs
Why screenprints and giclées are both desirable, what makes them different, and which kind of artwork each method serves best.
Silkscreen prints are desirable for good reason. The ink sits on the paper in separate layers. Colours can be dense and direct. A close look may reveal a little texture, a slight variation, or the evidence of the printer's hand.
Screenprint and giclée are different kinds of print.
A screenprint often begins as a work made for screenprinting. A giclée often begins with a painting, drawing, or photograph that needs to be reproduced with as much of its visual information intact as possible. The two methods can produce beautiful work, but they ask different things of an image.
Silkscreen, silk screen, and screenprint
Screenprint and silkscreen usually mean the same thing. “Silkscreen” comes from the material once used for the mesh. Contemporary screens are more often made from synthetic mesh, but the older name remains common.
How a screenprint is made
In a screenprint, a printer pushes ink through a mesh screen onto paper. Parts of the screen are blocked to make a stencil. If the image has several colours, each colour normally needs its own screen and pass through the press.
That process asks the artist and printer to think in layers. They decide where one colour stops, where the next begins, and how the layers will meet. Keeping everything aligned is called registration. A small shift can be a flaw, or it can become part of the character of the print.
Screenprinting can be hand-pulled in a print studio or automated for commercial production. The process is used across art, packaging, textiles, and signage. Automation changes how the press is operated and how quickly it runs. It does not make screenprinting a better way to reproduce a painting.
The resulting work can feel wonderfully physical. A solid yellow, red, or black may sit with more presence than the same colour in a photographic reproduction. Some screenprints use only a few colours. Others take many screens, proofs, and a great deal of labour.
What screenprints do beautifully
Screenprint has a natural affinity with bold shapes, graphic composition, areas of saturated colour, text, and imagery that benefits from visible layers. The process can also suit an artist who wants the printed work to be its own object, rather than a close copy of an earlier painting.
That is part of why screenprints are so at home in limited editions. An artist may work with a print studio, approve the colours and proofs, then sign and number a fixed run. The edition carries the decisions of the artist, the printer, and the process itself.
But limited editions are not a property of the technique. A screenprint can be an open edition. A giclée can be a signed, numbered limited edition. The edition size, signing, and whether more prints will be made are separate questions from how the image reached the paper.
Why screenprint and giclée are not interchangeable
A painting can contain hundreds of small decisions that are hard to separate into a handful of flat layers: several near-identical greens in a landscape, a soft shadow along a face, the faded edge of a brushstroke, or a thin line changing colour as it crosses another form.
A skilled screenprinter can interpret that information, sometimes with many screens. The result can be excellent, but it is an interpretation. The work has to be translated into the language of the process.
Giclée takes a different route. A professional fine art printer works from a detailed source image, adjusts the file for the chosen paper, and uses archival pigment inks to build the image from very small droplets. It is usually the more suitable method when the aim is to reproduce a painting's tonal shifts, fine detail, and colour relationships on fine art paper.
| Silkscreen / screenprint | Giclée | |
|---|---|---|
| Faithful painting reproduction* | ||
| Bold, graphic artwork | ||
| Subtle tonal shifts and fine detail | ||
| Physical ink layers | ||
| Production | May be hand-pulled or automated | Digital printing from a prepared source image |
| Editions | May be open or limited, signed or unsigned | May be open or limited, signed or unsigned |
*Stars express an editorial preference for the purpose named in each row. They are not a measure of a print’s overall quality, value, or desirability. For reproducing a painting, giclée is usually the more faithful method.
Two artworks, two better fits
These examples show how the work itself can point toward the right printing method.
Built for silkscreen
This WPA travel poster turns a scene into clear, separate areas of colour. It can be read quickly from a distance, which is one of screenprinting’s strengths. Its success does not depend on reproducing the soft shifts of light in an earlier painting.
Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup I is a more familiar example of the same affinity between silkscreen, repeated images, and bold colour.
Better served by giclée
Vermeer’s painting depends on gradual shifts: the light across the face, the edge where blue turns into shadow, the folds and texture of the girl’s jacket, and the dark ground behind her. Screenprinting can reproduce tonal imagery through halftones and colour separations. For a painting like this, a carefully made giclée is usually the more direct way to preserve gradual colour changes and fine detail.
Does one have more value?
No printing method settles that question by itself. An original screenprint made with an artist and a respected print studio can have a particular kind of collectibility. A careful giclée reproduction can offer an unusually close experience of a painting at a far more accessible price than an original or a rare edition.
Look at the individual work. Who made it? What does the edition information say? Is the image a new artwork for the print, or a reproduction of something else? What paper, inks, and printing process were used? Does the finished object let you see the artwork in a way that feels right for it?
Why Anclude uses giclée
Anclude focuses on painting reproduction. We want to carry a painting’s details, depth, and colour into a piece you can live with, on fine art paper and without glass between you and the printed surface.
That makes giclée the right choice for the work we make. Screenprinting is a fine art method in its own right, especially when an image wants a bold, layered, tactile translation.
Sources
Screenprinting process and materials, The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Screenprints and editions, Print Club London · Screenprinting as an artist's medium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Halftones and colour separations, New Zealand Printmakers
